James Wong - "A Garage Full of Mac Minis" — Angel Investing, and the Next Wave of L&A Innovation

Ryan Hinchey - Made by Distribution, for Distribution

Ryan Hinchey has one of the more unique résumés in the annuity business: actuary, Amsterdam expat, Silicon Valley insurtech veteran, and now SVP of Product Innovation at AmeriLife — one of the country's largest distributors of annuity, life, and health products. That arc turns out to be exactly the right background for what he's doing now. In this episode, Ryan walks through the three models AmeriLife uses to partner with carriers on product development — exclusive, leverage, and proprietary — and why the best ideas increasingly come from the IMO level, not the home office. He explains how he stress-tests product concepts before a single line of pricing work gets done, using a "product blueprint" that forces a clear value proposition early. He also talks candidly about the lessons from his time at Health IQ: get the reinsurer on board first, go after mid-tier carriers before the big names, and be willing to put skin in the game. On AI, Ryan is doing something genuinely interesting: using it to extract selling stories from wholesaler YouTube videos — structured intelligence on how real people pitch real products. Listeners come away with a sharper sense of what it actually takes to build an annuity product that distribution will move.

Wei Chen - Who Owns the Workflow? The Organizational Problem AI Actually Exposes

Wei Chen is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Business and co-leader of the Digital Frontiers Initiative. Over the last three years he's made generative AI his mission — graduate courses, executive workshops, a textbook, and now a business novel modeled after The Goal and The Phoenix Project, set inside an insurance company. His central argument: every serious conversation about AI and the workforce stops at the task level — which tasks AI can automate, which jobs are at risk. But tasks are only the bottom tier. The level that actually determines whether AI transforms an organization is the workflow: the connected chain of tasks that produces a business outcome. And the piece nobody's building is ownership — a named human who's accountable for the whole workflow, with the authority to stop it when something goes wrong. The conversation covers Wei's TWO framework (Task, Workflow, Owner), the "validation tax" that turns AI adoption into theater, an Illinois regulatory compliance failure that illustrates exactly what breaks when no one owns the workflow, and why the only approach that works for high-stakes industries like insurance is one workflow at a time — not replacing all four jet engines at once.

Joe Jordan, Ted Rosedale and George Bain - ROI Now Means Reliability of Income

This isn't a one-guest show. Paul brings together three of the industry's sharpest voices on retirement income — Joe Jordan, Ted Rosedale, and George Bain — for a roundtable on what's actually changing in retirement planning, and what isn't. Joe Jordan frames the demographic shift hiding underneath every tech headline: the U.S. has more centenarians than any country on earth, the worker-to-retiree ratio is heading toward zero, and Social Security benefits are mathematically on track for a 20% cut by 2033. Ted Rosedale explains why Social Security is the largest financial asset most Americans hold — and the most misunderstood — and how the new RSSA designation, now offered through The American College, is closing the advisor knowledge gap on 2,700+ claiming rules. George Bain makes the case that the $14 trillion in U.S. home equity is the leg of the retirement stool advisors keep ignoring, and that reverse mortgages have moved from "barbershop rumor" to legitimate planning tool. The through-line: AI changes how advisors work. It doesn't change demographics, the cost of getting Social Security wrong, or the trust required to put a real plan in place. Link to Joe: https://www.josephjordan.com/ [https://www.josephjordan.com/]

Brian Poppe - "You Can't Just Slap AI On It" And The Four-Phase Test for Carrier AI Adoption

Brian Poppe has done something rare in L&A: he started as an actuary, founded Mutual of Omaha's innovation practice as the entire department of one, served as Chief Data Officer, and now runs the company's life insurance P&L. That breadth is the lens for this conversation. Brian walks through his four-phase AI adoption framework — awareness, helping individuals, redesigning processes, and AI talking to AI — and gives a refreshingly honest read on where carriers actually sit. (Spoiler: most claiming phase four are still in phase two.) He shares the story of a partnership he loved but had to kill because the timing of the offer to grieving families was wrong, why he flew his CTO to Silicon Valley for a "petting zoo tour" that became the foundation of Mutual of Omaha's cloud insurer, and where he thinks carriers will see the first real process redesign — back-office NIGOs, not underwriting. Listeners will leave with a sharper way to evaluate their own carrier's AI maturity and a clearer sense of what real innovation looks like inside a Fortune 500 mutual.

Branislav Nikolic - Indices Are the Fuel. Products Are the Engines.

Branislav Nikolic spent nine years at CANNEX, wrote a PhD dissertation on retirement and annuity optimization, and was doing machine learning back when it was still called machine learning. Today he runs the insurance practice at The Index Standard — the independent firm rating, forecasting, and benchmarking the 150+ indices feeding America's FIAs, RILAs, and IULs. In this episode, Branislav explains why eight out of every ten FIA dollars still flows into the S&P 500 even after gold ran 60% and silver ran 130% in 2025. He breaks down why excess-return indices became confusing the moment interest rates moved off the floor, why "going to zero is your hero" is a bad way to compare an FIA to a market index, and why the indices that have actually performed best aren't the simplest or the most complex but the ones in the middle. He also makes the case for renewal rate integrity as the next thing the industry has to clean up — and tees up where The Index Standard goes next as carriers reopen the NAIC illustration guidelines.